Al Capone Biography

Al Capone (January 17, 1899 – January 25, 1947),
popularly known as Al "Scarface" Capone, was an infamous
Italian-American gangster in the 1920s and 1930s, although his
business card reportedly described him as a used furniture
dealer. A Neapolitan born in New York City to Gabriele and
Teresina Capone, he began his career in Brooklyn before moving
to Chicago and becoming Chicago's most notorious crime figure.
By the end of the 1920s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had
placed Capone on its "Most Wanted" list. Capone's downfall
occurred in 1931 when he was indicted and convicted by the
federal government for income tax evasion.

Biography

Al Capone was born to Gabriele Capone (1865 – 1920) and his
wife Teresina (“Theresa”) Raiola (28 December 1867 – 1952) in
Brooklyn, New York, at the turn of the 20th century. Gabriele
was a barber from Castellammare di Stabia, a village about 15
miles south of Naples, Italy. Teresina was a seamstress and the
daughter of Angelo Raiola from Angri, a town in the province of
Salerno. The Capones had immigrated to the United States in
1894, and settled in the Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn,
New York. Gabriele and Teresina had seven sons and two
daughters:

Al Capone quit high school at the age of 14 when he fought with
a teacher. He then worked odd jobs around Brooklyn, including a
candy store and a bowling alley. After his initial stint with
small-time gangs, Capone joined the notorious Five Points Gang
headed by Frankie Yale. It was at this time he began working as
a bartender and bouncer at Yale's establishment, The Seedy
Harvard Inn. It was there that Capone would engage in a knife
fight with a thug, Frank Gallucio, after Capone had made a bold
move on Gallucio's sister. Gallucio had deeply slashed Capone's
right cheek with a switchblade, earning him the nickname that he
would bear for the rest of his life, “Scarface”.

In 1918 Al married Mae Coughlin, an Irish woman, who gave him a
son that year, Albert Francis ("Sonny") Capone. The couple lived
in Brooklyn for a year. In 1919 he lived in Amityville, Long
Island, to be close to “Rum Row”. Capone was still working for
Frankie Yale and is thought to have committed at least two
homicides before he was sent to Chicago in 1919. Yale sent his
protégé to Chicago after Capone was involved in a fight with a
rival gang. Yale's intention was for Capone to “cool off” there;
the move primed one of the most notorious crime careers in
modern American history.

The Capone family moved to a small, unassuming house at 7244
South Prairie Avenue in Chicago. Cicero, Illinois, a Chicago
suburb, would serve as Capone's first headquarters. Initially,
Al took up grunt work with Johnny Torrio's outfit, but the elder
Torrio immediately recognized Capone's talents and by 1922
Capone was Torrio's second in command, responsible for much of
the gambling, alcohol, and prostitution rackets in the city of
Chicago. One of his greatest triumphs was the seizure of the
region of Cicero in 1924. It became known as one of the most
crooked elections in Chicago's long history with voters
threatened at the polling station by thugs. Al Capone's mayoral
candidate won by a huge majority but it was only weeks later he
claimed he would run Capone out of town. In order to counter
this Capone met with his puppet-mayor and personally knocked him
down the town hall steps. It was a powerful assertion of
gangster power and a huge victory for the Torrio-Capone
alliance. The event was marred however by the death of Frank
Capone at the hands of the police. It broke his brother's heart.
Unshaven (a gangster form of mourning), Capone cried openly at
the funeral and ordered the closure of all the speakeasies in
Cicero for a day as a mark of respect.

Severely injured in an assassination attempt in 1925, the shaken
Torrio returned to Italy and gave the reins of the business to
Capone. Al was notorious during the Prohibition era for his
control of the Chicago underworld and his bitter rivalries with
gangsters such as Bugs Moran and Hymie Weiss. Raking in vast
amounts of money from illegal gambling, prostitution, and
alcohol (some estimates were that between 1925 and 1930 Capone
was making $100 million a year), the Chicago kingpin was largely
immune to prosecution due to witness intimidation and the
bribing of city officials, such as Chicago mayor William "Big
Bill" Hale Thompson. Al was reputed to have several other
retreats and hideouts including French Lick, Indiana; Dubuque,
Iowa; Hot Springs, Arkansas; Johnson City, Tennessee; and
Lansing, Michigan.

In 1928, Al bought a retreat on Palm Island, Florida. It was
shortly after this purchase that he orchestrated seven of the
most notorious gangland killings of the century, the 1929 St.
Valentine's Day Massacre. Although details of the massacre are
still in dispute, and no person was ever charged with the crime,
the killings are generally linked to Capone and his henchmen,
especially Jack "Machine Gun" McGurn, who is thought to have led
the operation. By staging the massacre, Capone was trying to
dispose of his arch-rival Bugs Moran, who controlled gang
operations on the North Side of Chicago. Moran was late for the
meeting and escaped an otherwise certain death.

Throughout the 1920s, Al was often the target of attempted
murders, being shot once in a restaurant and having his car
riddled with bullets from nose to tail on more than one
occasion. However the assassins were normally amateurs and
Capone was never seriously wounded.

By 1929 Al Capone had earned 105 million dollars. 60 million
dollars of it was from alcohol.

Although Al always did his business through front men and had no
accounting records (which are receipts) (his mansion was in his
wife's name), Al Alcini started linking him to his earnings. New
laws enacted in 1927 allowed the federal government to pursue
Capone on tax evasion, their best chance of finally convicting
him. Part of the reason Capone was taken to task in this way was
his status as a celebrity. On the advice of his publicist he did
not hide from the media by the mid twenties and began to make
public appearances. When Charles Lindbergh performed his famous
trans-Atlantic flight in 1927 Capone was among the first to push
forward and shake his hand upon his arrival in Chicago. He
gained a great deal of admiration from many of the poor in
Chicago for his flagrant disregard of the prohibition law that
they all despised. He was viewed for a time as a loveable
outlaw, partially due to his extravagant generosity to strangers
and often lending a hand to struggling Italian-Americans,
something he once was. His night club, the Cotton Club, became a
hot-spot for hot new acts such as Charlie Parker and Bing
Crosby. Al Capone was often cheered in the street and it was
only the brutal murders of the St Valentines day massacre and
the 1929 crash that made people view him once again as a killer
and social parasite. This was despite Capone's opening of soup
kitchens in Chicago's poorest suburbs. Contributing to his
vilification in April 1930, Frank J. Loesch, chairman of the
Chicago Crime Commission compiled a list of “Public Enemies”
whom he saw as corrupting the city. The list was published by
newspapers nationwide and Capone's name was at its head, leading
to him earning the nickname “Public Enemy No. 1”.

Pursuing Al were Treasury agent Eliot Ness and his hand picked
team of incorruptible U.S. Treasury agents "The Untouchables"
and IRS agent Frank Wilson, who was able to find receipts
linking Capone to illegal gambling income and evasion of taxes
on that income.

FBI file photo. The trial and indictment occurred in 1931. The
Alcinis tried to help Capone but he pleaded guilty to the
charges, hoping for a plea bargain. But, after the judge refused
his lawyer's offers and Al's associates failed to bribe or
tamper with the jury, Al Capone was found guilty on five of
twenty-two counts and sentenced to eleven years in a federal
prison.

Al was first sent to an Atlanta prison in 1932. However, the
mobster was still able to control most of his interests from
this facility. Therefore, he was soon ordered to be transferred
to the infamous California island prison of Alcatraz in August
of 1934. Here, Capone was strictly guarded and prohibited from
any contact with the outside world. His number was AZ-85. With
the repeal of Prohibition and the arrest and confinement of its
leader, the Capone empire soon began to gradually wither. Capone
entered Alcatraz with his usual confidence. Many of his
“friends” who were in fact people who feared him rather than
liked him had mostly gone straight with families and kept away
from crime. When Capone returned, these friends tried to avoid
him or simply agreed to do as he asked without following up on
the agreement. Capone beat one of his “best friends” half to
death for defying him. When Al attempted to bribe guards, he
would find himself sent to the “hole”, or solitary confinement.
Eventually Capone's mental state began to deteriorate. One
example of his erratic behavior was that he would make his bed
and then undo it, continuing this pattern for hours. At times Al
refused to leave his cell at all, crouching in a corner and
talking to himself in Italian or, according to some, complete
gibberish. Al Capone began telling people that he was being
haunted by the ghost of James Clark, a victim in the St.
Valentine's Day Massacre, paranormal investigators were even
sent in to observe him and his surroundings, though they
ultimately decided that Capone was simply mentally unhealthy. It
was apparent over time that Capone no longer posed much of a
threat of resuming his previous gangster-related activities.

Once Al Capone had been imprisoned, Capone's control and
interests within organized crime immediately ran into rapid
decline. It is often argued that Al's decline in mental health
during his imprisonment was catalyzed by the breakdown of his
power and income; both Capone's physical and mental health was
seen to notably decline; most noticeably an onset of dementia
most likely caused by an elongated infection of syphilis,
untreated since it was contracted in his youth, as well as
noticeable weight loss. Al Capone spent the final year of his 11
year sentence as a resident of the Baltimore State Mental
Institution before retiring to his estate in Miami, Florida.

On 21 January 1947, Al Capone had an apoplectic stroke. He
regained consciousness and started to feel better until
pneumonia set in on 24 January. The next day Al Capone died from
cardiac arrest. Al was originally buried in Mount Olivet
Cemetery, in Chicago's far South Side between the graves of his
father, Gabriele, and brother, Frank; however, in March 1950 the
remains of all three family members were moved to Mount Carmel
Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois, west of Chicago.

One of the most notorious American gangsters of the 20th
century, Al has been the subject of numerous articles, books,
and films. He has been portrayed on screen by Nicholas Kokenes,
Wallace Beery, Paul Muni, Barry Sullivan, Rod Steiger, Neville
Brand, Jason Robards, Ben Gazzara,
Robert De Niro,
William Devane, Titus Welliver and William Forsythe.

The Paper Lace song entitled "The Night Chicago Died" imagines
Capone and his army of criminals waging war against the Chicago
Police force.

Al Capone and his era were highlighted in the 1959 television
film The Untouchables and its feature film and television series
remakes which has created the popular myth of the personal war
between the crime lord and Eliot Ness.

In several stories in the alternative history anthology Back in
the USSA by Kim Newman and Eugene Byrne, Al Capone is imagined
as the brutal dictator of a United States of America which
experienced a communist revolution in 1917 instead of Russia,
and is presented as an obvious analog to Joseph Stalin.

A vault of Al Capone's was opened by Geraldo Rivera on live
television in 1986 on The Mystery of Al Capone's Vault.

Tunnels found under the city of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan are said
to have been another hideout of Capone's. The anfractuous
tunnels are a very popular tourist attraction, due in part to
the alleged link to Capone.

In addition, often in western world culture, Al's persona and
character have been used for inspiration and as a model for
countless crime lords and criminal master minds ever since his
death. Al Capone's accent, mannerisms, facial construction,
sometimes his physical stature, type of dress, and often even
parodies of his name are found throughout various cartoon series
villains as well as some movies. Usually the portrayals are not
slighting or insulting parodies in their nature, as these said
parody characters are generally shown as wily and crafty
criminal characters.